“Marijuana growers are developing high-tech methods for getting high-yield crops. Marijuana Hydroponics: High Tech Water Culture is an excellent guide to growing without soil.This book has all the information needed to set up a system using nutrient solutions in controlled environments. Also contains equipment lists, diagrams and step-by-step instructions for assembling a homemade state-of-the-art, high-yield water culture growing system.”

Publisher: Ronin
Paperback: 116 pages
Illustrated

“Over 30 million people in the United States regularly smoke marijuana. Approximately 400,000 defendants each year are charged with the use, possession, sale or cultivation of marijuana. Marijuana Law describes how people can reduce the probability of arrest and defend themselves from prosecution if arrested. Readers will learn when a police officer can legally stop them; when they can be searched; when they have to be read their rights; what to do if an officer comes to their home with (or without) a search warrant; and how to counter many police tactics simply by knowing their rights.”

Publisher: Ronin
Paperback: 171 pages

Where is reality heading? Here are verbatim interviews with 16 souls who have set the universe spinning in a more divine direction, and it's all about consciousness, baby, to a lesser or greater degree. David Jay Brown, an accomplished psychologist/psychopharmocology buff (and sci-fi novelist) and his cohort offer up some of the best gray matter of our century, naked, there for you to poke and prod and get inside of. The sparse editing reveals the true colors of the subjects: we find McKenna mercurial in wit, and Lilly as cracked as a flowerpot smashed against one of his famed isolation tanks. Brown and Novick have all the angles and in-the-know queries, but even their rare deficiencies are printed.
On the possibility of time travel: “McKenna: Apparently you can move information through time, as long as you don't move it through time faster than light.
Brown: Why is that?
M: I haven't the faintest idea. Who am I, Einstein?”
Recurring questions involve psychedelics, male/female relations, the conscious mind, human evolution, and extraterrestrial visitations. The subjects' pet topics include Terence McKenna on psilocybin mushrooms, the archaic revival vs. New Age, novelty theory; Eisler/Loye on the partnership model; Robert Trivers on reciprocal altruism; Nick Herbert on physics and consciousness, fringe science, time travel; Ralph Abraham on mathematical dynamics and chaos theory; R.A. Wilson on the Illuminati, information; Timothy Leary on death, computers; Rupert Sheldrake on formative causation, morphic fields, memory storage; Carolyn Mary Kleefeld on artistic expression, evolutionary processes; Colin Wilson on the occult, evolution; Oscar Janiger on psychiatry, LSD and creativity, DMT; John Lilly on God, talking dolphins, brain chemistry, war; Nina Graboi on psychedelics, politics of sexuality; Laura Huxley on nutrition, the mind/body connection; Allen Ginsberg on poetry, madness, New Age movement; Stephen LaBerge on lucid dreaming, sleep. SK

Publisher: Crossing
Paperback: 331 pages
Illustrated

Soviet neuropsychological pioneer A.R. Luria's study of a man discovered to have a literally limitless memory. Experiments and interviews over the years showed that his memory was based on synaesthesia (turning sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything only by an act of will, and that he was handicapped intellectually because he could not make discriminations.

Publisher: Harvard University
Paperback: 160 pages

“A startling look beyond science—an investigation that recognizes no barriers to human thought… Were occult forces at work in Hitler's Germany? Do human mutants exist among us who are as different from men as men are from the great apes? Is it possible that the human brain emits high-frequency waves that might be picked up by other persons? How much did the alchemists know about the development of atomic energy?”

Publisher: Online/Pemberton
Paperback: 328 pages

“From Siberia to Africa, from antiquity to modern times, music has been associated with ritual trance and altered states of consciousness… Rouget demonstrates that neither the neurological effect of rhythm nor drug use nor mental illness can account for the power of music in trance states.”

Publisher: University of Chicago
Paperback: 395 pages

Technical biochemical treatise on the manner in which therapeutically used drugs modify the nervous system through the knowledge of the functions, distribution and control of neurotransmitters in the brain. Each chapter is devoted to a specific neurotransmitter; its synthesis, storage, release, receptor interaction and inactivating mechanisms together with drugs that interact with neurotransmission.
Specifically targeted to students of medicine, pharmacology, pharmacy and postgraduate psychology, this book requires some knowledge of basic biology in order to be understood. MC

Publisher: Chapman and Hall
Paperback: 208 pages
Illustrated

“Nothing is definite, nothing precise,” Alvarez says of The Dark; even the author's negotiation of night itself, promised to unfurl with “a face of crumpled linen” and “a horrible smell of mould,” falls prey to random electric surges, dissolving finally into Freud's erotic interpretations of violets. Flowers in the night? Have we hit the REM stage yet? Alvarez, whose precocious indulgence in sex and food “lasted perhaps a dozen years and then was usurped by a new obsession: sleep,” drags us to his sleep lab by the hair, forcing us, Clockwork Orange style, to watch him dream, stumble over Freud and Coleridge, and inspect a “rosebud”-mouthed East Village whore. “The root cause of crime is poverty,” he quotes, until we howl between the sheets. Our bedtime prayers beg to deliver the moral of the story: Don't attempt to look for answers once the light has been turned off. JS

Publisher: Norton
Paperback: 290 pages
Illustrated

“Here is the paradigmatic cry of the tortured artist. In this meditation on darkness stemming from a sustained insomniac hyperlucidity, Cioran grapples with life wearing the gloves of anguish and despair.”

Publisher: University of Chicago
Paperback: 128 pages

An eloquent, unabashed paean to the joys and healing properties of that most romantic of potions, which can be extracted from poppies (Papaver somniferum) grown right in the back yard. Covers historical use of opium; subjective and objective descriptions of its effects; opium and naturally occurring endorphins; its “bastard children” morphine, heroin and Dilaudid; brewing poppy tea (not quite the easy high the author would suggest); papaver botany; suggestions on making homemade opium; poppy politics and more. SS

Publisher: Loompanics
Paperback: 112 pages
Illustrated